Quotes & Sayings About Idle Time

Joblessness does not necessarily mean idleness — Sunday Adelaja

The men came to mind as mostly idle between nights of running wild or time in the pen, cooking moon and gathering around the spout, with ears chewed, fingers chopped, arms shot away, and no apologies grunted ever. The women came to mind bigger, closer, with their lonely eyes and homely yellow teeth, mouths clamped against smiles, working in the hot fields from can to can't, hands tattered rough as dry cobs, lips cracked all winter, a white dress for marrying, a black dress for burying, and Ree nodded yup. Yup. — Daniel Woodrell

Nature, being a wise and provident lady, governs her parts very wisely, methodically, and orderly: Also, she is very industrious and hates to be idle, which makes her employ her time as a good housewife doth. — Margaret Cavendish

As someone who makes his living as an actor, my routine varies almost every day. There are weeks I'm working and weeks I'm not. People think it must be great to have all that time off, but you'd be surprised how quickly that grass would become greener. The idle brain is the devil's playground. — Eric Lange

Avoid idleness, and fill up all the spaces of thy time with severe and useful employment; for lust easily creeps in at those emptinesses where the soul is unemployed and the body is at ease; for no easy, healthful, idle person was ever chaste if he could be tempted; but of all employments, bodily labor is the most useful, and of the greatest benefit for driving away the Devil. — Jeremy Taylor

When ye look at me I am an idle, idle man; when I look at myself I am a busy, busy man. Since upon the plain of uncreated infinity I am building, building the tower of ecstasy, I have no time for building houses. Since upon the steppe of the void of truth I am breaking, breaking the savage fetter of suffering, I have no time for ploughing family land. Since at the bourn of unity ineffable I am subduing, subduing the demon-foe of self, I have no time for subduing angry foe-men. Since in the palace of mind which transcends duality I am waiting, waiting for spiritual experience as my bride, I have no time for setting up house. Since in the circle of the Buddhas of my body I am fostering, fostering the child of wisdom, I have no time for fostering snivelling children. Since in the frame of the body, the seat of all delight, I am saving, saving precious instruction and reflection, I have no time for saving wordly wealth. — Milarepa

Think not that when thou art dry and darksom in the presence of God, with faith and silence, that thou do'st nothing, that thou losest time, and that thou are idle, because not to wait on God, according to the saying of St. Bernard (Tom.5.in Fract. de vit. solit.c.8.p. 90.), is the greatest idleness — Miguel De Molinos

Let us not waste our time in idle discourse! Let us do something, while we have the chance! It is not every day that we are needed ... .To all mankind they were addressed, those cries for help still ringing in our ears! But at this place, at this moment of time, all mankind is us, whether we like it or not. Let us make the most of it, before it is too late! — Samuel Beckett

On many an idle day have I grieved over lost time. But it is never lost, my lord. Thou hast taken every moment of my life in thine own hands.
Hidden in the heart of things thou art nourishing seeds into sprouts, buds into blossoms, and ripening flowers into fruitfulness.
I was tired and sleeping on my idle bed and imagined all work had ceased. In the morning I woke up and found my garden full with wonders of flowers. — Rabindranath Tagore

The oak was, of course, a great stealer of the surrounding pasture - its only value to provide shade for the livestock - but it was a magnificent tree. It had been there at least as long as Luxtons had owned the land. To have removed it would have been unthinkable (as well as a forbidding practical task). It simply went with the farm. No one taking in that view for the first time could have failed to see that the tree was the immovable, natural companion of the farmhouse, or, to put it another way, that so long as the tree stood, so must the farmhouse. And no mere idle visitor - especially if they came from a city and saw that tree on a summer's day - could have avoided the simpler thought that it was a perfect spot for a picnic. — Graham Swift

It is quite true that I have worshipped you with far more romance of feeling than a man usually gives to a friend. Somehow, I had never loved a woman. I suppose I never had time. Perhaps, as Harry says, a really grande passion is the privilege of those who have nothing to do, and that is the use of the idle classes in a country — Oscar Wilde

The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether - very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life. Soon it would be overtaken by the passive distractions of radio, but for the moment reading remained most people's principal method for filling idle time. — Bill Bryson

I won't read scripts because I have a limited amount of time. Why should I help other people do lame stuff when I can just go out and put on lame stuff of my own? — Eric Idle

This is therefore a time, not for unkindly criticism of fellow Christians, but for friendly conference; not for disputing over divergent views, but for united action; not for dogmatic assertion of prophetic programs, but for the humble acknowledgment that "we know in part;" not for idle dreaming, but for the immediate task of evangelizing a lost world. For such effort, no one truth is more inspiring, than that of the return of Christ. None other can make us sit more lightly by the things of time, none other is more familiar as a Scriptural motive to purity, holiness, patience, vigilance, love. — Charles R. Erdman

Years ago when I served as a missionary, we had a visit from Dr. James E. Talmage of the Council of the Twelve
a great student, a great teacher, great theologian, and a great prophet.. Here we sat at his feet every idle minute that we could find and plied him with questions and listened to his counsel.
On one occasion he said to us, I want to tell you missionaries something. The day of sacrifice is not past! The time will come, yet, when many Saints and even Apostles will yet lose their lives in defense of the truth! — Harold B. Lee

Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together ... Speech is too often ... the act of quite stifling and suspending thought, so that there is none to conceal ... Speech is of Time, silence is of Eternity ... It is idle to think that, by means of words, any real communication can ever pass from one man to another ... — Maurice Maeterlinck

Regret for time wasted can become a power for good in the time that remains, if we will only stop the waste and the idle, useless regretting. — Arthur Brisbane

The idle apprehend more things, are deeper than the industrious: no task limits their horizon; born into an eternal Sunday, they watch- - and watch themselves watching. Sloth is a somatic skepticism, the way the flesh doubts. In a world of inaction, the idle would be the only ones not to be murderers. But they do not belong to humanity, and, sweat not being their strong point, they live without suffering the consequences of Life and of Sin. Doing neither good nor evil, they disdain - spectators of the human convulsion - the weeks of time, the efforts which asphyxiate consciousness. What would they have to fear from a limitless extension of certain afternoons except the regret of having supported a crudely elementary obviousness? Then, exasperation in the truth might induce them to imitate the others and to indulge in the degrading temptation of tasks. This is the danger which threatens sloth, that miraculous residue of paradise. — Emil Cioran

This notion of rest, it's attractive to her, but I don't think she would like it. They are all like that, these women. Waiting for the ease, the space that need not be filled with anything other than the drift of their own thoughts. But they wouldn't like it. They are busy and thinking of ways to be busier because such a space of nothing pressing to do would knock them down. No fields of cowslips will rush into that opening, nor mornings free of flies and heat when the light is shy. No. Not at all. They fill their mind and hands with soap and repair and dicey confrontations because what is waiting for them, in a suddenly idle moment, is the seep of rage. Molten. Thick and slow-moving. Mindful and particular about what in its path it chooses to bury. Or else, into a beat of time, and sideways under their breasts, slips a sorrow they don't know where from. — Toni Morrison

Vices are simply overworked virtues, anyway. Economy and frugality are to be commended but follow them on in an increasing ratio and what do we find at the other end? A miser! If we overdo the using of spare moments we may find an invalid at the end, while perhaps if we allowed ourselves more idle time we would conserve our nervous strength and health to more than the value the work we could accomplish by emulating at all times the little busy bee.
I once knew a woman, not very strong, who to the wonder of her friends went through a time of extraordinary hard work without any ill effects.
I asked her for her secret and she told me that she was able to keep her health, under the strain, because she took 20 minutes, of each day in which to absolutely relax both mind and body. She did not even "set and think." She lay at full length, every muscle and nerve relaxed and her mind as quiet as her body. This always relieved the strain and renewed her strength. — Laura Ingalls Wilder

I'm uncontrollably in love with Vivian. In such a short amount of time she's infiltrated my thoughts, cast a spell over my body, and wormed her way into the deepest part of my heart. A day without her would feel like a lifetime without breath, an eternity without light. — Jewel E. Ann

We haven't remained idle, twiddling our thumbs while you were off having a good time. — V.C. Andrews

about to make, but the idea had faded. Not for the first time that day, she wished the hall outside her door hadn't become the official gathering place for coworkers in search of gossip and idle chit chat. It wasn't like her to lose focus so easily. Karen couldn't afford to slow down, — Lynne M. Spreen

Writers tend to suffer from back problems because they spend their time bent over a desk. — Eric Idle

No "natural" resource is more precious and to be used more wisely than time. These mortal moments matter more than we know. There are no idle hours; there are only idle people. In true righteousness there is serenity, but there is an array of reminders that the "sacred present" is packed with possibilities which are slipping by us, which are going away from us each moment. — Neal A. Maxwell

Most of the time, feelings just seem to get in the way. They're a luxury for the idle, a bourgeois concept. Feelings are overrated. — Nick Cave

The discipline of AutoQuotery is based on generating axiomatic entries that technically provide a mechanism to serve later on as a network of neural synapses between the very same lexemes it is utilizing. However, those lexical atomic units are signed differently -by the AutoQuoter- from their usages in the dictionary and therefore behave semantically in a wave-like pattern and syntactically in a particle-like pattern within the boundaries of the produced Quotery Lexicon itself. As time passes by, the semantics attain a standing-waves state mimicking thereby the dictionary; and almost ends up putting the synapses in an idle state when no more signals are being transferred between the lexemes. Philosophy would insist that an idle state cannot be reached, while Reason would emphasize -as a response- that such a perception is only pedagogically sensed when engaging (by studying, practicing or teaching) in the AutoQuotery discipline. — Ibrahim Ibrahim

It is the idle man, not the great worker, who is always complaining that he has no time or opportunity. — Orison Swett Marden

He reaches over, takes my face in his hands and pulls me to him. In my idle moments, imagining such a scene, I have always assumed that it would be the other way round, that I would reach for him and he would pull away, denouncing me as a degenerate and a false friend. But now I am neither shocked nor surprised by his initiative, nor do I feel any of the great urgency that I thought I would, should this moment ever come to pass. Instead, it feels perfectly natural, everything he does to me, everything that he allows to happen between us. And for the first time since that dreadful afternoon when my father beat me to within an inch of my life, I feel that I have come home. — John Boyne

Idle time is the devil's play. — Mark Dayton

The other great force is changing social habits. Karl Marx said that the world would be divided into people who owned the means of production - the idle rich - and people who worked for them. In fact it is increasingly being divided between people who have money but no time and people who have time but no money. The on-demand economy provides a way for these two groups to trade with each other. — Anonymous

I belong to an ancient, idle, wild and useless tribe, perhaps I am even one of the last members of it, who for many thousands of years, in all countries and parts of the world, has, now and again, stayed for a time among the hard-working honest people in real life, and sometimes has thus been fortunate enough to create another sort of reality for them, which in some way or another, has satisfied them. I am a storyteller. — Isak Dinesen

Do not listen to vain and empty talk, in which the majority of world-loving people spend their time, and do not take pleasure in it. For the law says: 'You shall not raise false reports' (Ex. 23:1). Solomon says: 'Remove far from me vanity and lies' (Prov. 30:8). The Lord said: 'But I say to you, every idle word that men shall speak they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment' (Mt. 12:36). — Lorenzo Scupoli

When the peasants and their song had vanished from his sight and hearing, a heavy feeling of anguish at his loneliness, his bodily idleness, his hostility to this world, came over him ... It was all drowned in the sea of cheerful common labor. God had given the day, God had given the strength. Both day and strength had been devoted to labour and in that lay the reward ... Levin had often admired this life, had often experienced a feeling of envy for the people who lived this life, but that day for the first time ... the thought came clearly to Levin that it was up to him to change that so burdensome, idle, artificial and individual life he lived into this laborious, pure and common, lovely life. — Leo Tolstoy

I want to be as idle as I can, so that my soul may have time to grow. — Elizabeth Von Arnim

I have only to contemplate myself; man comes from nothing, passes through time, and disappears forever in the bosom of God. He is seen but for a moment wandering on the verge of two abysses, and then is lost.
If man were wholly ignorant of himself he would have no poetry in him, for one cannot describe what one does not conceive. If he saw himself clearly, his imagination would remain idle and would have nothing to add to the picture. But the nature of man is sufficiently revealed for him to know something of himself and sufficiently veiled to leave much impenetrable darkness, a darkness in which he ever gropes, forever in vain, trying to understand himself. — Alexis De Tocqueville

On the proper role of coincidence in fiction
- more exactly in storymaking, ... Aristotle declares in effect that since real life now and then includes unlikely coincidences both idle and consequential ... a storymaker may legitimately deploy such a possible-though-improbable happenstance to begin the tale or to give its plot-screws an early turn. Thereafter, however, the Plausible (even when strictly impossible) is ever to be preferred to the Possible-but-Unlikely; and in the resolution of a plot, most particularly, coincidence ought to be eschewed. Fate in fiction, decrees the great A, ought to flow from character and situation, not from chance; let no god on wires drop down at climax-time to rescue the storymaker from whatever dramaturgical corner his want of experience, talent, or judgment has painted him into. — John Barth

On a mission your worst enemy is idle time. — Nipsey Hussle

We say we value the legacy we leave the next generation and then saddle that generation with mountains of debt. We say we believe in equal opportunity but then stand idle while millions of American children languish in poverty. We insist that we value family, but then structure our economy and organize our lives so as to ensure that our families get less and less of our time. — Barack Obama

As the Power grows, its proved friends will also grow; and the Wise, such as you and I, may with patience come at last to direct its courses, to control it. We can bide our time, we can keep our thoughts in our hearts, deploring maybe evils done by the way, but approving the high and ultimate purpose: Knowledge, Rule, Order; all the things that we have so far striven in vain to accomplish, hindered rather than helped by our weak or idle friends. There — J.R.R. Tolkien

And if nobody reads me, shall I have wasted my time, when I have beguiled so many idle hours with such pleasant and profitable reflections? — Michel De Montaigne

Mina and I fear to be idle, so we have been over all the diaries again and again. Somehow, although the reality seem greater each time, the pain and the fear seem less. — Bram Stoker

When you get older, you come to trust in time. Not that I'm meaning you sit idle and let it pass. — Nora Roberts

A popular management term used to describe efficiency is called "working smart." We are told that if we work smart instead of hard, we will be more productive. But if we do work "smart" then we are likely to have idle time, and if we are idle we will likely be thought of as being lazy or worthless. — Charles Hayes

The best lesson from the myths of Newton and Archimedes is to work passionately but to take breaks. Sitting under trees and relaxing in baths lets the mind wander and frees the subconscious to do work on our behalf. Freeman Dyson, a world-class physi- cist and author, agrees: "I think it's very important to be idle...people who keep themselves busy all the time are generally not creative. So I am not ashamed of being idle. — Scott Berkun

In theory, people would pick progression every time over being idle. But if you look at us as a culture, as a people, you would say that if you get up at five o'clock in the morning, eat your breakfast, go to work, make money, pay your bills, you're progressing, when you're still doing what's comfortable. — Q-Tip

Why are you idle? If you don't grasp it first, it flees.' And even if you do grasp it, it will still flee. So you must match time's swiftness with your speed in using it, and you must drink quickly as though from a rapid stream that will not always flow. In — Seneca.

I neither oblige the belief of other person, nor overhastily subscribe mine own. Nor have I stood with others computing or collating years and chronologies, lest I should be vainly curious about the time and circumstance of things, whereof the substance is so much in doubt. By this time, like one who had set out on his way by night, and travelled through a region of smooth or idle dreams, our history now arrives on the confines, where daylight and truth meet us with a clear dawn, representing to our view, though at a far distance, true colours and shapes. — John Milton

But there's not enough time in life to go sit at a party, have a drink, and make idle conversation. There's too many important things to do. Just being together with my husband, spending time alone, which I have very little of. — Pia Zadora

For it was the one that I would have chosen above all others, convinced as I was, with a botanist's satisfaction, that it was not possible to find gathered together rarer specimens than these young flowers that at this moment before my eyes were breaking the line of the sea with their slender heads, like a bower of Pennsylvania roses adorned a Cliffside garden, between whose blooms is contained the whole tract of ocean crossed by some steamer, so slow in gliding along the blue, horizontal line that stretches from one stem to the next that an idle butterfly, dawdling in the cup of a flower which the ship's hull has long since passed, can wait, before flying off in time to arrive before it, until nothing by the tiniest chink of blue still separates the prow from the first petal of the flower towards which it is steering. — Marcel Proust

New York musicians rarely have the time for idle chat and conversation after a gig. Despite popular assumption of our scintillating after-hours, that illusion is overtaken by the constant hustle to juggle a part-time or full-time job, a myriad of errands, a second or third gig of the day, and perhaps a child or two somewhere. — Kat Edmonson

His creation was a sort of new religion; the churches, gradually deserted by a wavering faith, were replaced by this bazaar, in the minds of the idle women of Paris. Women now came and spent their leisure time in his establishment, the shivering and anxious hours they formerly passed in churches: a necessary consumption of nervous passion, a growing struggle of the god of dress against the husband, the incessantly renewed religion of the body with the divine future of beauty. — Emile Zola

Even though I'm resting I'm accomplishing something by sewing that shirt that I've been meaning to sew for weeks. And it's relaxing. It's so very meditative and quiet and enjoyable. But at least I'm producing something. I'm being productive in some way. I have a very hard time being completely idle. — Evangeline Lilly

Time is just going on and on .But I still here Idle just Waiting for someone and nothing else — Amardeep Singh

Money is indispensable to a long-circuit heavy load energy system. It must be used when a sufficient surplus is being produced to allow a margin for exchange, and cost of transport, over a considerable distance. Money represents a storage battery when idle, and a generalized mode of the conversion of energy when it is in motion, with a function of equating time and space. — Isabel Paterson

She probably had all the time in the world, Therese thought, probably did nothing all day but what she felt like doing. — Patricia Highsmith

Everything that we enjoy is a result of someone's hard work. Some work is visible and other work goes unseen, but both are equally important. Some people stop working as soon as they find a job. Regardless of the unemployment statistics, it is hard to find good people to work. Many people don't understand the difference between idle time and leisure time. Idle time amounts to wasting or stealing time; leisure time is earned. Procrastinating amounts to not working.
Excellence is not luck; it is the result of a lot of hard work and practice. Hard work and practice make a person better at whatever he is doing. — Shiv Khera

The way I think I should stay out of trouble is by stayin' busy. With idle time comes a lot of biz, so the more my work load is heavy, I'll have no time to get into any trouble or makin' dis tracks or get into conversation about any other rappers. — Gucci Mane

He lifted a hand and turned and went on. He had divested himself of the little cloaked godlet and his other amulets in a place where they would not be found in his lifetime and he'd taken for talisman the simple human heart within him. Walking down the little street for the last time he felt everything fall away from him. Until there was nothing left of him to shed. It was all gone. No trail, no track. The spoor petered out down there on Front Street where things he'd been lay like paper shadows, a few here, they thin out. After that nothing. A few rumors. Idle word on the wind. Old news years in traveling that you could not put stock in. — Cormac McCarthy

I've got soggy thighs. It must be dinner time. — Eric Idle

[My grandfather] returned to what he called 'studying.' He sat looking down at his lap, his left hand idle on the chair arm, his right scratching his head, his white hair gleaming in the lamplight. I knew that when he was studying he was thinking, but I did not know what about. Now I have aged into knowledge of what he thought about. He thought of his strength and endurance when he was young, his merriment and joy, and how his life's burdens had then grown upon him. He thought of that arc of country that centered upon Port William as he first had known it in the years just after the Civil War, and as it had changed, and as it had become; and how all that time, which would have seemed almost forever when he was a boy, now seemed hardly anytime at all. He thought of the people he remembered, now dead, and of those who had come and gone before his knowledge, and of those who would come after, and of his own place in that long procession. — Wendell Berry

I don't want your babies, Felix. I can assure you I'm not sitting up here like some tragic fallen woman every night dreaming of having your babies." She began tracing a figure of eight with her fingernail along his stomach. The movement looked idle but the nail pressed in hard. "You realize of course that if it were the other way round there would be a law, there would be an actual law: John versus Jen in the high court. And John would put it to Jen that she did wilfully fuck him for five years, before dumping him without warning in the twilight of his procreative window, and taking up with young Jack-the-lad, only twenty-four years old and with a cock as long as my arm. The court rules in favor of John. Every time. Jen must pay damages. Huge sums. Plus six months in jail. No - nine. Poetic justice. — Zadie Smith

One of the things I admire about longer stories is the way writers can work with dead time and slower, more idle moments - not only can they feel expansive, they feel lived-in; the unhurried pacing often makes the endings even more resonant and surprising for me. — Molly Antopol

The dictionary also invites a playful reading. It challenges anyone to sit down with it in an idle moment. There are worse ways to kill time. — Mortimer J. Adler

I would love to get a place out in the country and spend my idle time just remodeling and planting seeds and watching them grow. — Joe Lando

Betsy Trotwood don't look a likely subject for the tender passion, but the time was, Trot, when she believed in that man most entirely. When she loved him, Trot, right well. When there was no proof of attachment and affection that she would not have given him. He was a fine-looking man when I married him", said my aunt, with an echo of her old pride and admiration in her tone. "I was a fool; and I am so far an incurable fool on that subject, that, for the sake of what I once believed him to be, I wouldn't have even this shadow of my idle fancy hardly dealt with. For I was in earnest, Trot, if ever a woman was. There, my dear. Now, you know the beginning, middle, and end, and all about it. We won't mention the subject to one another any more; neither, of course, will you mention it to anybody else. This is my grumpy, frumpy story, and we'll keep it to ourselves, Trot! — Charles Dickens

It is idle to waste time and discuss whether it was within our power and duty to see whether we could prepare a Bill better than the Remedial Bill. — Charles Tupper

Idlers cannot even find time to be idle, or the industrious to be at leisure. We must always be doing or suffering — Johann Georg Ritter Von Zimmermann

It would be idle to say that we were not, from time to time, aware that a volcano slumbered fitfully beneath us. There were dark sides to the Slavery Question, for master, as for slave. — Mary Virginia Terhune

This merely formal conceiving of the facts of one's own wretchedness is at the same time a departure from them
placing them in the object. It is not idle, therefore, to observe reflexively that in that very Thought, one has separated himself from them, and is no longer that which empirically he still sees himself to be. — William Ernest Hocking

Denied the outlet, through play, of his energies, he recoiled upon himself and developed his mental processes. He became cunning; he had idle time in which to devote himself to thoughts of trickery. — Jack London

You had felt idle in this city through which you had paced only to kill time. But the emptiness that you believed yourself confronted with was an illusion: you had filled those moments with sensations all the more powerful in that nothing and no one had distracted you from them. — Edouard Leve

There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind, for I knew that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said to me: I am not long for this world and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true. Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded to me like the name of some maleficent and sinful being. It filled me with fear, and yet I longed to be nearer to it and to look upon its deadly work. — James Joyce

A website can be very time-intensive, but I'd love to have one where people can contribute to it - like invent islands and make their own flags, and their own laws. I think that'd be kind of fun. — Eric Idle

Yes, take a little time to play And look at life the other way. God rested when the world was made: Rest now, old friend; be not afraid. But think not that your work is over, That you are now a foot-free rover, A rambler upon idle ways, Whittling away the golden days. For in the road climb to the goal There's no long furlough for a soul. There's no long pause: on every height Another summit swims in sight. The long road rises, scene by scene, With little restings in between. — Edwin Markham

I spend a good deal of time wondering how we will seem to the people who come after us. This is not an idle interest, but a deliberate attempt to strengthen the power of that "other eye," which we can use to judge ourselves. — Doris Lessing

Today we may face some boring task or idle conversation that feels like a complete waste of time. Perhaps next week or next year we'll understand that nothing is wasted, that in the economy of our universe even a weed is simply a flower whose use has yet to be discovered. — Mort Crim

There are two ways of being happy: We may either diminish our wants or augment our means- either will do- the result in the same; and it is for each man to decide for himself, and do that which happens to be the easiest. If you are idle or sick or poor, however hard it may be to diminish your wants, it will be harder to augment your means. If you are active and prosperous or young and in good health, it may be easier for you to augment your means than to diminish your wants. But if you are wise, you will do both at the same time, young or old, rich or poor, sick or well; and if you are very wise you will do both in such a way as to augment the general happiness of society. — Benjamin Franklin

Sometimes I find it difficult to determine whether or not I'm merely spinning my wheels or making progress. Nevertheless, I must keep moving on until I reach a destination. For I would much rather be in perpetual motion with the promise of reaching some place majestic beyond the horizon, rather than sitting idle alongside a dirt road watching time hurriedly pass me by. — Terry A. O'Neal

In 1927, if you were stuck with idle time, reading is what you did. It's no accident that the 'Book-of-the-Month Club' and 'The Literary Guild' were founded in that period as well as a lot of magazines, like 'Reader's Digest,' 'Time,' and 'The New Yorker.' — Bill Bryson

I'm a call-sheet junkie. I love being on set. So, the hardest thing for me is dealing with all this idle time. That's when I get into trouble. — Shia Labeouf

Librarians are serious people, seldomgiven to idle jocularity. The reason for this, I believe, is because we are overwhelmed by the enormous number of good books waiting to be read, leaving little time for frivolity. My personal list of must-read books presents a daunting challenge; I can't even imagine the pressure our head librarian must be under. — Lynn Austin

One who does not rouse themself when it is time to rise, who, though capable, is full of sloth, whose will and thought are weak, that lazy and idle person will never find their way to true knowledge. — Gautama Buddha

Why do you wait," asks he. "Why are you idle? If you don't seize the day, it escapes." Even though you seize it, it still will flee; therefore you must compete with time's haste in the speed of using it, and, like a gush of water that blasts past and will not always flow calmly, you must drink fast. — Seneca.

I came from a poor family, so working and going to school at the same time was natural. It taught me multi-tasking, although we didn't call it that back then. I learned I could never be idle, I need to be doing many things at once. — Alan Dershowitz

Yes, there is work enough for all of us and today is no time to be idle — Martha Foote Crowe

But as Van casually directed the searchlight of backthought into that maze of the past where the mirror-lined narrow paths not only took different turns, but used different levels (as a mule-drawn cart passes under the arch of a viaduct along which a motor skims by), he found himself tackling, in still vague and idle fashion, the science that was to obsess his mature years - problems of space and time, space versus time, time-twisted space, space as time, time as space - and space breaking away from time, in the final tragic triumph of human cogitation: I am because I die. — Vladimir Nabokov

How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present to think of the character and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside and forgotten. — Washington Irving

Determine never to be idle. No person will have occasion to complain of the want of time, who never loses any. It is wonderful how much may be done, if we are always doing. — Thomas Jefferson

The primacy of acceptance is not intended to condemn man to passivity; it does not mean that man can now sit idle, as Marxism claims. On the contrary, it alone makes it possible to do the things of this world in a spirit of responsibility, yet at the same time in an uncramped, cheerful, free way, and to put them at the service of redemptive love. — Pope Benedict XVI

After Death nothing is, and nothing, death,
The utmost limit of a gasp of breath.
Let the ambitious zealot lay aside
His hopes of heaven, whose faith is but his pride;
Let slavish souls lay by their fear
Nor be concerned which way nor where
After this life they shall be hurled.
Dead, we become the lumber of the world,
And to that mass of matter shall be swept
Where things destroyed with things unborn are kept.
Devouring time swallows us whole.
Impartial death confounds body and soul.
For Hell and the foul fiend that rules
God's everlasting fiery jails
(Devised by rogues, dreaded by fools),
With his grim, grisly dog that keeps the door,
Are senseless stories, idle tales,
Dreams, whimseys, and no more. — John Wilmot

She spent her idle time conceiving of musicals that would never be. It was the only medium that could properly express our true madness and hypocrisy---our collective ability to sit in a theater watching lunatics sing nonsense while the world outside burns. — Dave Eggers

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WHAT TO BEGIN NEXT

I can't decide what work, what study, to being next, among the several possible. If there is no spirit, no soul, no divine dimension or value, then whatever we do is just killing time, meaningless and idle. On the other hand, if God and the mystery of spirit overlap with this time and place in simultaneous layering, then anything we work on performs eternity and is the very motion of mystery. Each gesture and word and idea appears in this moment's presence and in the other as well. This is a great truth of being.

Whether a particular actions leads toward a future heaven or hell is not worth considering. Even when you will die is not important. Eternity creates itself at this point. This moment is where you grow nearer and nearer God. Time and the infinite curl together in every nick, touch, taw, tine, and root fiber. Here and now is where you can be shown the miracle of what continuously occurs. — Bahauddin

Thanks be to God. Since my leaving the drinking of wine, I do find myself much better, and do mind my business better, and do spend less money, and less time lost in idle company. — Samuel Pepys

Like most others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell-raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top. At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along on a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles - a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other - that kept me going. — Hunter S. Thompson

I used to be quite a big video game player at university and post-university in that weird moment in life before you have a proper job and you've got a lot of idle time. — Stephen Merchant

As we pass one step, and as we recognize it as being behind us, the next one already rises up before us. By the time we learn everything, we slowly come to understand it. And while you come to understand everything gradually, you don't remain idle at any moment: you are already attending to your new business; you live, you act, you move, you fulfill the new requirements of every new step of development. If, on the other hand, there were no schedule, no gradual enlightenment, if all the knowledge descended on you at once right there in one spot, then it's possible neither your brains nor your heart could bear it. — Imre Kertesz

People who truly have control over time always have some in their pocket to give to someone in need. A sense of priorities drives their use of time and it can shift away from the ordinary work that's easy to justify, in favor of the more ethereal, deeper things that are harder to justify. They protect their time from trivia and idiocy; these people are time rich. They provide themselves with a surplus of time. They might seem to idle, or relax more often than the rest, but that just might be a sign of their mastery, not their incompetence. — Scott Berkun

Spring comes with flowers, autumn with the moon, summer with the breeze, winter with snow. When idle concerns don't fill your thoughts, that's your best season. — Wumen Huikai

If you create you will also wait, and while you're waiting you will want to be patient but not idle ... responses from the world often take a long time. — Eric Maisel